A Project of The Center for Climate and Security

Where is climate change the biggest threat to security?

The international security environment writ large will face threats and pressures from climate change. Climate change, interacting with other risks to international security, is likely to have the greatest impact on unstable, conflict-prone, and strategically-significant regions. Political and demographic realities, combined with climate change, food and water insecurity, suggest that the Middle East, North, East and Central Africa, as well as certain nations in Central Asia, will in the near-medium term face the most significant security risks from a changing climate. However, a growing coastal and urban population in the broader Asia-Pacific region, coupled with projected climate change-exacerbated stresses on water security, mean that the nations of the Asia-Pacific are also particularly vulnerable to climate change effects. A rapidly-melting Arctic, and shifting geopolitical dynamics in the area (including a worsening relationship between Russia and its Arctic neighbors) could combine to increase geopolitical tensions in a relatively stable area. Sea level rise also constitutes an existential threat to low-lying island nations. In identifying future climate-security “hotspots,” however, a better integration of climate and natural resources stresses into our analyses of state fragility is needed.